Shadows in the White City

CHAPTER 15

Across town at the same time

Jane and Gabby had not been able to sit idle all this time and had gone in search of Audra. They located her on a street corner in the company of others, including King Robin. All of the children had undoubtedly heard of Danielle’s fate, and most of them scattered on seeing Jane and Gabby, but Audra, Robin, and a handful held their ground.

Jane convinced those remaining to accept a carriage ride to Hull House where she had friends who would take care of them. “At least until the police catch this madman who killed Danielle,” she pleaded.

“No one can catch the Devil,” countered Robin, even as he urged his followers to climb into the carriage. None of them had ever been in a cab before, and they took it as a great opportunity that would not come again. It quickly became a free-for-all.

In fact, the ride to Hull House was boisterous and fun for all, but as they neared their destination, Gabby began interrogating Audra, asking when she had last seen Danielle and who might have been with her when she’d disappeared. “Why was she alone? Where were the other children in her gang?”

“Danny…she sometimes went off on her own,” said Robin.

“Said she needed thinking time.” Audra began sobbing. None of the other children could add to this.

Robin explained that the two bands mutually supported one another, and that everyone liked Danny as they affectionately called her. After this, Robin opened up, telling Jane and Gabby a story about himself and his mother. “One night last year, we made a bed out of a large freight box, newspapers, and some brush in the park by the lake, the place where a lotta drunks gather after all the bars are closed. And it was my turn to stand guard against the “screamers.”

“Screamers?” Jane asked, making all of Robin’s followers laugh.

“Packs of roaming addicts-screamers.”

“What sort of addicts?”

“All sorts. Booze, heroin, opium. Anyhow, while mama slept, I guarded her. That’s when all of a sudden Charlie was standing before me, dressed in his army uniform.”

“And Charlie is?”

“My dead brother. Died in the Indian Wars out West.”

“I’m so sorry Robin,” Jane replied, placing a hand over his, but he quickly withdrew.

Robin then gnashed his teeth, gulped, and teared up but kept on with his story, pretending some lint had flown into his eye. “My brother’s spirit, says he, ‘The Devil got loose from under the river!’”

“The river?”

“The Chicago River. He found a hole under Lake Michigan and came up through the river is what Charlie was saying out of his dead mouth. Then he said, ‘The rich people didn’t stop him!’ And then he says, ‘The angels need soldiers.’”

“So he was warning you, your brother?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. He’s close by, watching us right now.”

Gabby piped in. “One of the good angels, heh?”

“Where is your brother now?”

Robin opened the window sash on the carriage and looked about. Seeing nothing, he stuck his head out farther and returned his head with a smile. “He’s atop the coach, beside the driver, enjoying the ride.”

“He’s perched on the coach seat?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Gabby asked, “Is he, you know, stuck on this plane of existence, this realm?”

“Charlie’s spirit thinks he is needed in the war.”

“The war?” Gabby repeated just as the coach hit a huge pothole, jarring her but making the children cheer.

“War of angels, the one you’ve been told about.”

“He’s lingering here so he can fight back?” asked Jane.

“Now he has the power, yes.”

“So where now is your mother, Robin?”

Robin looked about the cab at all the expectant faces. It was a secret he had not told anyone; he informed them now, prefacing what he wanted to unload. “Mum is in county hospital.”

“Cook County?” asked Gabby.

“Sick…sick she is…up here.” Robin pointed to his head.

A chubby Polish boy piped in, his name Stanley. “My dead cousin told me that as soon as water touches the Devil’s skin, it turns deep burgundy and…and horns, they grow from his head. The river itself turns into blood; spirit screams and the bones of murdered children float on the water.”

“And just when the angels think they’ve convinced Good Streets-people like us-that they are in as much danger as Bad Streets, Satan vanishes through a secret gateway beneath the river, or lake, or pond, or ocean depending where you are.”

“I see,” said Jane, her heart silently sobbing for these children.

“Now he’s coming your way,” Audra warned.

Robin quicky added, “You’ll need to learn how to fight.”

“Teach me,” replied Jane.

At the same time Gabby asked Stanley why he was carrying a ratty old school book that’d been torn and beaten.

“I can’t go to school,” replied Stanley.

“But you carry school books?”

“Only cause Robin got them for me. He ought to grow up to be a teacher.”

“Perhaps he will.”

Stanley dropped his wide-eyed gaze in a gesture of sadness.

“‘Study hard,’ Robin tells us all,” said another of the children.

“Stay strong and smart so’s you count on yourself, no one else, is what he always says,” added Audra.

“And he taught us to never stop watching out for one another,” added little Stanley, his blond hair wispy and wild.

“To watch our backs,” said Audra.

“For Bloody Mary, you mean?” asked Gabby.

“And Satan?” added Jane. “Zoroaster?”

“I tell them what I’m telling you now, ladies,” Robin said, his voice ominous. “Bloody Mary is coming with Satan. And she’s seen your face. She’s picked you out for a no good end.”

Jane placed a hand on Gabby’s shoulder at this warning.

“What about this predator, the one the police and the press are after, the child killer?” Jane asked Robin point-blank. “How does he figure into this war of angels and with Bloody Mary?”

“How do you know that Leather Apron is a he?” Robin asked in return.

“Guess I’ve assumed it a statistical probability.”

“I think Bloody Mary is Leather Apron,” replied Robin.

“What makes you say so?”

“At least, she is directing his movements.”

“Why do you say so?” asked Jane.

“I saw her with Danny a couple of times lately.”

“Why do you think Danny’d go off with Bloody Mary, if she feared her so?” asked Gabby.

“Nothing goes on here on the streets without Bloody Mary having a hand in it,” added the sullen Noel.

Jane’s frustration filtered through in her voice. “Zoroaster, Satan…and the Blue Lady?”

“God, she works for God.”

“And where are God and the Angel Warriors and the Blue Lady?”

“Hiding out. Lickin’ their wounds…”

“Hiding out where?”

“Hiding out in plain sight. In hospitals, banks, schools. Here on the street. Danielle was an angel, and for all I know, you and your daughter, you could be warrior angels.”

“That’s sweet of you to say.”

“It’s not sweet. It’s instinct.” Robin then looked her hard in the eye and added, “You…you remind me of my mother before…before she got sick.”

She reached across the carriage to hug him, but Robin pulled back, saying, “Look…I have nothing to give you beyond the facts of life on the street, but soon maybe…maybe I will know something. I have my eyes open and my ears to the ground. If you two are willing to pay in goods or coin.”

“We’re budgeted to pay for information that leads to this killer, sure.”

“All right, then you’re going to hear from me again…soon.”

“No, not if it places you in danger, Robin-any of you,” insisted Jane.

The carriage had pulled to a stop at Chicago’s famous Hull House, where Jane Addams herself stood on the steps awaiting their arrival. Dr. Jane Francis had contacted her long-time friend and confidant, asking her to help out and offering a generous check for Hull House in the bargain. Jane had thought about the homeless children since the first day Audra had introduced them, and she’d sat down and asked herself a series of questions: Who would care to know about the homeless children? Who would want to create a program of hope for them? Who would already know that kids need love and perhaps pets as well as books and schooling to help save them from everyday fears and horrors, traumas and the exigencies of life on the street, life without a daily routine, life without a bed and a roof and four walls and a lock on the door?

Who indeed. The revelation coming in at her felt so horrible, so distasteful that she wanted to scream out its impossibility even as it formed in her mind. Chicago, her city, had helped greatly a madman by letting these children down. The Vanishings were nothing new; in a quieter but just as awful way, kids had been vanishing before their eyes since the city’s inception.

Jane Addams had become the fulcrum for the settlement movement that preached for shelter communities in every neighborhood. She was always at the center of anything dealing with destitute women and children. If there were a program in place to put homeless children in physical touch with orphaned and impounded puppies, to give them a warm meal and a place to lay their heads at night, this was the place. If there was any chance whatsoever of finding good foster care for such as Robin, Audra, Stanley, and the others, it was Hull House, as Jane Addams had a sixth sense about people.

Dr. Jane Francis realized that Alastair had a job to do, and must end this slaughtering of the innocent, but it was increasingly clear to her that these children were not a direct path to the killer. They were the lure but could not be used as the bait.

It was possible, yes, that the killer had knowledge of the morbid “religion” professed by the homeless, and used its precepts against them along with enticements, no doubt-food, money, toys, the promise of a pet…or immortality as a follower of Zoroaster!

It was a wild, anxiety-ridden bird of a notion, which now fluttered insanely inside Jane’s brain, and perhaps ought to remain there. She saw herself trying to sit astride the back of this “fowl” idea that had invaded her mind. The idea that Dr. Christian Fenger, Nathan Kohler, and she-as she had entered into a deal with the others-might benefit from all of this horror by delivering up the killer to Senator Chapman’s idea of justice.

Christian had told her of the secret only the day before. She’d been told that Alastair had flatly declined Senator Chapman’s “kind and generous offer,” and she respected him for taking the higher, moral ground, but to her mind there was a difference in her own notions of getting hold of a share of this treasure. How much good it could do in the hands of the caretakers of Hull House to feed and clothe these children. Still, she remained removed from any direct connection even as she’d quietly provided Christian with information gleaned from Audra and the other children.

Jane had not been comfortable with the role that Christian had placed her in, but unlike Alastair, she had no compunction about how this monster they called Leather Apron would meet justice, so long as he did! And if she could cash out a dramatic winner thanks to Chapman’s deep pockets, so be it. Like Christian and Kohler, she could use the money, but now she’d begun thinking any such funds must go to these homeless-these daily survivors.

Still the godawful gnawing at the pit of her stomach and around the edges of her soul about this deal continued inexorably to erode away sane notions and to taunt her. So often good things were done in the name of humanity, religion, love, brotherly concern, fatherly passion, a mother’s love, for god and country, and this for a grandfather’s vengeance. But so often it proved a complete lie, a fabrication, a distortion, an illusion. It was one of life’s tragic comedies, and largely due to her experience and training-she must pay close heed to her instincts and suspicions.

She watched the children line up at the order given them by a stern Jane Addams, whose very tone, icy and firm, the children seemed to welcome, even Robin, as though he would gladly relinquish his crown if someone else, an adult, would please take it.

Jane and Gabby climbed last from the carriage, waving at the heavyset woman on the steps with the unforgettable smile and commanding presence. At the same time, Jane Francis glanced at the topmost coach seat for Robin’s brother, imagining him just there.

“What’d you make of Robin’s story about his dead brother?” Gabby asked in her ear as if reading her thoughts. “You think it true?”

“I’ve no doubt that soldiers, who die a traumatic, violent, and sudden death often are left in limbo. They sometimes send out messages-confusing and vexing and conflicting images, yes, but images nonetheless.”

Gabby and Jane helped settle the children in at Hull House, and once this was accomplished, Jane Addams gave them the full tour and a brief history of her work here. As she listened to the indefatigable Miss Addams, Dr. Jane Francis offered up her services as a physician to bring health care on a regular basis to Hull House.

Miss Addams stared for a moment at Jane Francis, a single tear appearing in the older woman’s eye. The tear swelled and slipped down her cheek. Addams brushed it away. “So good of you, Dr. Francis.”

The following night

Alastair was on a crawl tonight, but not a pub crawl-rather an information-gathering crawl in search of Bosch. Ransom the Bear was afoot, exercising his feet and hips and sweating off some pounds and getting nowhere.

Police work was like that. Hours upon hours of simple hard work leading to nothing, and sitting idle, and making rounds, and asking question after question with little result, and then came the explosion in the face. Some event or happening bursting on the scene to give a shock to the system.

Thus far no shock had come, only an interminable bore amid a lot of filth.

“Where the hell is Bosch?” he must have repeated the question a hundred times in a hundred permutations in a hundred venues tonight.

“’Ave ya seen Bosch?” he addressed the drunks in one alley.

“Seen that gimp, Bosch, tonight?” he inquired at Muldoon’s.

“Heard Dot ’n’ Carry comin’ or goin’ tonight?” he asked at the Red Lion.

“If you fellas see or hear that peg leg, tell ’im I’m looking for him.”

No one had seen him. No one knew where he might be. He failed to appear at any of his normal haunts. It spelled only one thing: fear.

The tune from the racetrack played in Ransom’s brain: Dance boatman dance…dance boatman dance.

Henry Bosch had gone into hiding like a frightened animal, and his brief stint at the track was a bid for much needed cash. Now that he had money, he’d become difficult to find. Normally, he showed up like a bad penny and Alastair did not have to go looking, but the game pieces on the board had changed significantly. With Jervis being shot dead by Alastair Ransom in an old-time gun battle in Hair Trigger Alley-despite a ruling of self-defense-rumors abounded. Rumors surrounding various notions having to do with Ransom’s idea of vengeance; it was a vengeance that’d gone too far, spilled over the brim as it were, and next the rumors had Alastair drunk at the time (drunk with vengeance), despite his requiring a single shot to take down his man. Still, some felt that he had taken down the department with his street hooliganism. A lot of people suddenly liked Elias Jervis as next in line for sainthood. Perhaps Ransom ought be more than reprimanded; perhaps he should be made an example and stripped of his badge and placed on trial for murder.

Another rumor, this one circulating among authorities and whispered in his ear by both Behan and Logan had County Prosecutor Kehoe working late nights to put a case against Alastair on the docket.

Should this occur, a sheared, declawed Ransom would be a prized sight for a lot of Chicagoans, and it would be a large feather in Nathan Kohler’s cap. Sadly, if it should ever come, Ransom had but one witness, and a lousy one at that, Henry T. Bosch. How else might he prove a setup? How else might he cast a dark light on Nathan Kohler, should authorities above the police review board call for Ransom’s head?

So far as Alastair was concerned, it’d been a conspiracy that definitely involved Nathan Kohler, a dangerous man indeed. The circumstances and his inability to turn up Bosch again since the racetrack made Ransom wonder if Bosch hadn’t simply taken his winnings and made for Indianapolis or Davenport or Kankakee, if not farther from Chicago and Ransom. And it all made Ransom doubly suspicious that the wily old Civil War veteran indeed harbored damning information that Alastair could use against Nathan Kohler. Still, Bosch was correct about his sitting in a witness box. The image sent up red flags. Nonetheless, the more he stewed about it, the more Alastair meant to at least privately know everything. To this end, he meant to drag or beat the facts from Bosch. The sawed-off gimp knew what really happened the night Ransom was nearly killed by Elias Jervis.

Perhaps if he’d agreed with Kohler and Fenger, to throw in with their plan to turn over this Leather Apron killer to Senator Harold J. Chapman, then perhaps he’d not have Kohler on his back now. Kohler had to be sweating Ransom’s decision to remain aloof from the money and the corruption suggested by Senator Chapman. Kohler surely saw it as yet another threat to his power base.

While Bosch failed to find Ransom, young Samuel did not, and Sam, eager to earn more money, offered to guide Ransom to a location where he suspected the Leather Apron gang might be hiding out.

“Leather Apron gang?” he asked Sam where they stood back of Muldoon’s.

“Talk on the street is that there’s more than one, maybe a gang of ’em.”

“Where are you hearing this, Sam, from whom?”

“Sara for one, the girl you met the other night? She said the lot of them were following us that night, that they went right past her. She counted, like, sixteen of ’em.”

“Sixteen?” Alastair was skeptical.

“Yes, sir…according to Sara.”

“All right, do we need a carriage to get to this location?”

“Ahhh…I don’t but it’s pretty far for an old man.”

“Thanks, Sam, for thinking of me. Let’s go.”

They were soon approaching Michigan Avenue, and it recalled to mind that the senator’s granddaughter had been abducted not far from here. Sam announced that they needed to exit the cab and go on foot from here, the corner of Michigan at Wacker, and Ransom checked his weapon, seeing that it was loaded. Then he climbed out behind Samuel.

They were soon making their way down a series of ladders taking them into underground Chicago, passageways below Michigan Avenue and Wacker, an area used primarily by delivery wagons and drams coming and going, loading and unloading on docks built at the basement level-block upon block of businesses stretching from here to State Street.

The area was dirty, the roads here unpaved, cow paths originally to move beef on the hoof from railhead to slaughterhouse to market outlets, and finally to such establishments as Delmonico’s and The Palmer House. The underground network of roads here were nowadays used by any number of downtown businesses for deliveries and intakes. Workmen used the roads as a trash heap, it seemed. The wind blew through here like a monstrous force, sending up dirt devils and trash in small tornadoes. “There’s nothing down here,” complained Ransom. “Sam, are you just yanking my chain?”

“You gotta go deeper, sir.”

Ransom began to hear the tune again in the back of his head: Dance boatman dance…Is this kid playing me for a fool, he wondered.

After going down yet another level, finding an underground cavern, Ransom heard human voices ahead of them in the darkness. “We shoulda brought a lantern,” said Ransom.

“No, a lantern would only warn the Leather Aprons, and they’d be running off like rats in every direction.”

There was no need of a lantern because fires were burned in barrels ahead of them. They moved toward the light.

Samuel’s shadow crept ahead of them, and Ransom’s huge shadow foretold his coming, and it did appear a horror moving along the wall toward those huddled around the fire down here. They all began shouting at once:

“It’s Bloody Mary!”

“Zoroaster!”

“Satan’s come!”

Samuel shouted, “No! It’s Inspector Ransom! He’s come to kill the Aprons!”

“Please! Help me!” shouted one of the children in the grainy darkness where Alastair and Sam had stopped.

“I know Bloody Mary got Danielle, and I know I’m next!” shouted another.

This child was joined by the others. “You’ve got to hide me! Hide me!”

Alastair’s companion, Sam, shouted, “Don’t be fooled! Some of the Aprons have pretended to be like the rest of us, but they’re pimps, luring kids to Zoroaster, and then they all jump ’em and stab ’em all at once.”

“Sam’s right!” shouted King Robin, who’d asserted his authority and had recently led any of his band willing to follow him from the safety of Hull House to this so-called hiding place. “But we don’t know who’s the traitor.”

“But this time Zoroaster is dealing with me and not some child,” countered Alastair.

“They’re their own gang. There’re a lot of ’em,” warned Robin.

“Where’re they hiding? Where, Robin?” implored Ransom. “Tell me! Tell me now, Robin!”

“Deeper in,” he indicated the blackness of this underground passage.

Ransom was immediately suspicious, his near assassination still fresh in his mind. “Why, then, are all of you here? Why would you set up hiding so close to these Aprons?”

“We came to draw straws,” said Robin.

“Draw straws?”

“Give Zoroaster a sacrifice.”

The facts hit Ransom between the eyes like a blow from Muldoon’s sap. “Are you kids crazy?”

“If our gang gives up one member,” said Robin, “then…well then Zoroaster and Bloody Mary will leave us alone.”

Pagan shit, Ransom thought but said, “I see, and this was your idea, King Robin?”

“Actually it was Audra’s idea. I just put it in motion.”

“Hmmm…and where is Audra?”

“She’s a crybaby, so I sent her away.”

“Banished her? Isn’t that kinda like a death sentence these days?”

“She’s always moping around and crying; got on everyone’s nerves.”

Ransom considered this. Any show of weakness and you were reprimanded, and if it persisted, you were cut loose by King and Court. He dropped it, asking, “So who drew the short straw?”

“I did,” said Samuel, holding it up to the light.

“What? Wait…hold on. I didn’t know you belonged to this band, Sam.”

“I joined for safety. Just two days ago.”

“Hmmm…some irony, then, the newest member of the group drawing that straw.” Ransom knew the truth of it. They recruited Sam for this purpose, and Robin had seen to it that Sam got the short straw. It was about that time that Samuel had somehow bought some time and gone hunting for Alastair.

“OK, Sam, let’s go meet your fate, the two of us together along with Blue.”

“Blue?” asked Sam.

Alastair displayed his blue steel weapon. “I got it from the Blue Lady,” he lied.

Alastair pushed ahead of Sam and Robin’s band, telling them to hang back. As he moved from the fire, the darkness ahead of Alastair was near complete, only a small slither of light filtering from somewhere above at street level.

“Blood Mary’s coming for us!” shouted one of the kids in blackness.

“You gotta hide me, copper! Else I’m dead like Danielle!” shouted Noel in tears. King Robin was also now blubbering, terrified and hanging back near the fire. He’d seen what they’d done to Danielle, so Ransom could hardly blame him for blubbering, but arranging for Sam to go in as his goat, this was indefensible. “Zoroaster is gonna do me next!” Robin shouted.

The youngest of them, his face streaked with tears, shouted out now. “Don’t let Bloody Mary get us!”

The lanky, older boy named Hector added, “She’s killing us one by one until there are no more children left in the world, so all humankind will die off! That’s her plan.”

Alastair rushed toward the end of the tunnel where the so-called Apron gang were supposedly this moment assembled, awaiting the sacrificial lamb-Samuel. They would get Ransom instead.

Alastair half expected to be set upon by this gang awaiting him, and he pictured the poor abducted ones who’d vanished as having been attacked by a knife-wielding gang of murderous cultists. This made sense and fit with what Dr. Christian Fenger’s autopsy had supported. This could well be the end of the investigation. He knew these killers, whatever age, to be dangerous and well trained in wielding cleavers and knives. He recalled the “animals” he’d seen in the park after talking to Sara.

“Hang back, Sam,” he told the boy, but Samuel now displayed a bowie knife all his own, almost the size of his leg. The thing shone like ice in the darkness here, and in a moment of fright, Alastair wondered if the boy might not be one of them-one of the killing gang.

“I’ll not go down without a fight,” Sam whispered, “and I’ll not let you go it alone, Inspector.”

Ransom looked anew at the boy, studying Sam’s eyes and finding truth there; a feeling of pride for the boy welled up. “If ever had I a son, Sam…I’d have wanted him to be as brave as you.”

Sam choked out, “Thank you, sir.”

They moved on, inching forward.

Knives could come flying at them at any moment from any number of directions. Ransom extended his blue burnished .38 and was about to fire on seeing a large figure of a man in a group ahead bathed in weak light. Alastair’s night vision had cleared, and he recognized faces. The faces of Danielle’s followers, the one’s who’d gone into hiding on learning of her murder. None of them were holding knives so far as Alastair could see.

Some eleven children had followed the paths to here in their effort to locate a safe place in the city. Learning it’d been their leader-their queen-who’d been brutally murdered, they hadn’t time to grieve when fear had gripped them.

He put his gun away, making a show of it, realizing the large shadow he’d seen earlier had merely been a projection of the huddled group. “I’ve come to find you all,” he lied. “Come to take you to a safe house.”

One of the children grabbed hold of his huge leg and held on, and Alastair could feel the shivering little body against him. Like a modern retelling of the Pied Piper, all the others, like so many mice, scampered to the Bear and hung on. Sam stood back, put his knife away, and shook his head.

Alastair began guiding them from the underworld with a mantra: “I gotcha…you’re going to be all right…all right…all right.”

Alastair felt like Moses at having led the children and frightened young adults who wished to follow from the underground area around Wacker and Michigan. It had taken him another twenty-four hours to find places for them all. Most every shelter in the city was full to capacity. No one wanted to be on the streets with this madman on the loose, including homeless adults. So the Salvation Army and what few shelters existed bulged and were turning people away. Ransom had learned that Robin had led his followers out of Hull House, but these kids before him now had been Danielle’s followers. Without a leader, they’d stay put.

Ransom wound up accommodating his more adult charges like Robin at the Des Plaines lockup, called the Bridewell, an old English term meaning that the man locked up here was well shackled to this bride. The jails were, as usual, jam-packed as well, every inch of stone floor covered in a sea of bodies where they slept, but there were the stairwells and hallways. Even City Hall was full with the indigent, the homeless, and the runaways.

Once he had settled all his charges, he realized that Samuel had simply disappeared again and no telling where. No one had seen him go.

Later, arriving home, Alastair found Sam on his doorstep, tearful and pleading to be taken in.

Alastair could not turn the boy away, and so he found a pillow and blanket and put him on his settee for the night. Sam’s information had been wrong, and it had almost cost lives, had almost ended horribly in fact, had Alastair used his weapon down in that dungeon. Such an accident, involving the death of children, would most assuredly have given Chief Nathan Kohler all the ammunition he needed to end Alastair’s career in Chicago. Sure it was an error, a serious one for a paid informant to make, but Sam was, after all, just a boy. Alastair had forgiven him, but the boy fell asleep blubbering apologies.

Asleep, he looked the angel indeed, Alastair thought, and his cherubic features made Alastair wonder anew over the various interpretations of the “Angels’ War” and the whereabouts of little Audra about now.

The following morning, Sam had gone before Alastair rose from bed. “Vanished of his own accord,” Alastair mumbled when someone banged loudly at his door.

He stumbled to the source and opened it wide, shading his eyes from a bright sunlit morning. Philo stormed past and into the room.

“Alastair, they’ve made an arrest in the Leather Apron killings.”

“When will people stop calling it that? And who have they arrested?”

“That old crone, Bloody Mary!”

“Indeed…does not surprise me. In fact, it follows…as inevitable as the sun coming up and the moon going down.”

“But in either case, the sun does not actually come up and the moon does not actually go down; science has us going up and down, or rather around, spinning through the cosmos, so it only looks to our limited perspective-”

“All right, I get it.” Ransom covered his ears in a mocking gesture.

“Still, your point is well taken. Bloody Mary may well be a scapegoat in all this.”

“To be sure, she may know something, but she’s batty, and besides that, she has been here since the first brick was laid so-”

“So why now does she suddenly become a menace? Good question, one I’m sure that Chief Kohler is not asking.”

“Kohler is behind the arrest?” Alastair was instantly alert.

“Well…actually it was your friends, Logan and Behan, who dragged her in kicking and screaming, I’m told.”

“I don’t envy them their duty, and I know those men well…well enough to realize it was not their idea.”

“A smokescreen? A bone to throw press and public?”

“To make it appear we are hot on the trail of Leather Apron, would be my guess.”

“What will you do, Alastair? How can you stop this maniac with so many obstacles thrown in your path, and…and with your hands continually tied behind your back by bureaucratic fools like-”

“Please, Philo!” he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Allow me to dress. Sit, listen to music, be patient.”

“Of course, of course.”

Alastair felt an attack coming on and tried to determine which sort of attack it might be; it felt more like panic than pain, so he decided it was withdrawal pains as he had abstained from any morphine or opium for the past two days while chasing leads, and with the boy in his home the night before, he’d opted to remain sober, although he’d dosed himself the night before with quinine and antimony to fend off a threatening fever.

“While I dress,” he called over his shoulder, “tell me, how is your photographic study of the street children coming along?”

“Not well!” Philo’s pent up energy kept pace with Alastair, and he stood at his bedroom door now. “Too many paying jobs ahead of it, I’m afraid. Matter of finding time. But Alastair, there is something I brought to show you. It struck me anew when I’d returned to the notion of doing such an exhibit.”

“Oh? And what is that?” Alastair had reemerged with most of his clothes intact but buttons yet in need of latching, tie dangling over his shoulder, shoes in hand.

“Well, have a look.” Philo laid out a large photo that was grim and peculiar, and beautifully rendered.

Ransom gasped at the sight of a family in a smoky fog standing in an alley entranceway-all sullen-eyed, sunken-featured, gaunt, and looking like a family of starved wolves. It was a heart-wrenching shot, this “cut” of Keane’s, tearing at the soul until you looked more closely.

Mother held an infant in her arms while three others, ranging in ages that appeared between four and eleven, hung on to her dress, save the older boy who stood opposite, alongside his father. The older boy held a dead cat by the tail, a curled smile on his lips. In his other hand, he held a deboning knife. On closer inspection, the father, too had a blade in a scabbard protruding from beneath his moth-eaten coat.

“The happy family,” said Philo in dark jest. “Something about the whole picture is horribly disturbing, in light of developments.”

“Funny thing is…last night, I was stalking what I have become convinced is our killer-a family described to me just like this-but a family of cannibalistic butchers.”

“Too hideous to contemplate.”

“And so long as it is not contemplated, evil triumphs, Philo.”

“Agreed. And so it goes among us invisible, as the Phantom so recently proved.”

“Invisibility is effective.”

Philo nodded. “Requiring only our complacency.”

“Look, I must get down to the station house, see what Logan and Behan are up to, and if I feel I can trust them, I’ll share your photo and my new theory with them, and we can all proceed from there.”

“Understood. The photo is yours to do with as needed, my friend.”

Alastair snapped the last of his shoe buttons in place, stood and made for the door, where he grabbed his cane. “Good day, Philo.”

“Alastair!” The tone of Philo’s voice stopped him at the door.

“What is it?”

“Be…be careful out there!”

Alastair breathed deeply, tipped his hat, and replied, “Always…always,” as he ushered Philo out and bid him a final adieu.